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Lot Essay
With its daylit sky and night-shrouded street-scene visible in a vignette within an inky blue background, L'autre parole is a gouache showing a variation on one of René Magritte's most popular themes. This device was the subject of a series of paintings which Magritte started in 1949 entitled L'empire des lumières, several of which are owned by prominent museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Menil Collection, Houston and one in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels and one co-owned by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and Peggy Guggenheim Collection in New York and Venice.
The theme clearly struck a chord with collectors and with Magritte alike. The year after L'autre parole was executed, Magritte wrote a letter in which he discussed, 'a nighttime landscape and a sky such as we see during the day. The landscape evokes night and the sky evokes day.
'I find this evocation of night and day is endowed with the power to surprise and enchant us. I call this power: poetry.
'If I believe this evocation has such poetic power, it is because, among other reasons, I have always felt the greatest interest in night and in day, yet without ever having preferred one or the other.
'This great personal interest in night and day is a feeling of admiration and astonishment' (Magritte, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 177).
Comparison between L'empire des lumières and L'autre parole provides a fascinating insight into Magritte's working process, regarding his gouaches in particular. Here, it is clear that the gouache is not a mere repetition: instead, it is a reinvention, a variation. Magritte's gouaches are standalone objects in their own rights; indeed, it was in part for his virtuosity in this medium that, the following year, he would be asked by the Chicago lawyer and collector Barnet Hodes to create copies of some of his works from throughout his career. Rather than do this, Magritte instead made a series of works in which he explored those earlier themes and compositions, varying and even improving upon them.
The theme of the daylit sky and nighttime street may have appealed all the more to Magritte during 1955, when L'autre parole was created, because he had moved home that year following the death of his dog. In part to distract his wife Georgette from this loss, he moved into an apartment of which he wrote:
'In the evenings, it's like being in the picture - The dominion of light. The villa where I live is surrounded by gardens and the houses looking directly onto the boulevard Lambermont stand out against a wide sky' (Magritte, quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, London, 1993, p. 63).
The theme clearly struck a chord with collectors and with Magritte alike. The year after L'autre parole was executed, Magritte wrote a letter in which he discussed, 'a nighttime landscape and a sky such as we see during the day. The landscape evokes night and the sky evokes day.
'I find this evocation of night and day is endowed with the power to surprise and enchant us. I call this power: poetry.
'If I believe this evocation has such poetic power, it is because, among other reasons, I have always felt the greatest interest in night and in day, yet without ever having preferred one or the other.
'This great personal interest in night and day is a feeling of admiration and astonishment' (Magritte, quoted in H. Torczyner, Magritte: Ideas and Images, trans. R. Miller, New York, 1977, p. 177).
Comparison between L'empire des lumières and L'autre parole provides a fascinating insight into Magritte's working process, regarding his gouaches in particular. Here, it is clear that the gouache is not a mere repetition: instead, it is a reinvention, a variation. Magritte's gouaches are standalone objects in their own rights; indeed, it was in part for his virtuosity in this medium that, the following year, he would be asked by the Chicago lawyer and collector Barnet Hodes to create copies of some of his works from throughout his career. Rather than do this, Magritte instead made a series of works in which he explored those earlier themes and compositions, varying and even improving upon them.
The theme of the daylit sky and nighttime street may have appealed all the more to Magritte during 1955, when L'autre parole was created, because he had moved home that year following the death of his dog. In part to distract his wife Georgette from this loss, he moved into an apartment of which he wrote:
'In the evenings, it's like being in the picture - The dominion of light. The villa where I live is surrounded by gardens and the houses looking directly onto the boulevard Lambermont stand out against a wide sky' (Magritte, quoted in D. Sylvester, ed., S. Whitfield & M. Raeburn, René Magritte Catalogue Raisonné, vol. III, London, 1993, p. 63).